The Anatomy of aPhishing Attack
WHAT IS PHISHING?
PHISHING, SPEAR PHISHING, AND WHALING
Phishing is a cybercrime in which bad guys falsely takeon the identity of a legitimate sender to lure victims intoproviding sensitive information such as passwords andbanking details. Phishing attacks are most commonlyinitiated through email spoofing.
Phishing, spear phishing, and whaling attacks vary in complexity and targeting.
Phishing schemes have no specific target and phishing emails often contain spelling errors or other mistakes.
Phishing
Spear phishing is more personalized with communications appearing to come from sources known to the target.
Spear Phishing
Whaling attacks are spear-phishing attacks aimed athigh-profile targets within an organization.
Whaling
of confirmed data breaches involved phishing by luring users with malicious attachments or email links.
Email phishing threats grew 250% in 2018,with attackers switching between URLs, domains,
and servers when sending emails and hostingphishing forms during the same campaign.
An unsolicited email containing convincingcontent and a link from a seemingly familiaraddress arrives in the target’s inbox.
The link opens to a legitimate looking website that asks the user for their credentials. It is also common for malware to automatically download when the user clicks the email link.
The target submits sensitive information such as credit card or banking credentials and then gets redirected to the actual website. Meanwhile, the attacker makes off with the stolen info and can begin using it for malicious purposes.
The target clicks the link.
(Verizon 2018 DBIR)
(Microsoft Security Intelligence Report 2019)
93%
HOOK
LINE
SINKER
HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER:A TYPICAL PHISHING ATTACK
REAL FAKE
At Farsight Security, we help Fortune 500 organizationsfight phishing and other cyberattacks every day. Learnmore how we can help your organization and contact us at [email protected].
Organizations need other methods toprotect against risks posed by phishing.
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